Memphis Democrat
March 31, 2008

Ted here with all the news from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage this week.

Spring has clearly arrived. We awoke this morning to a dawn storm of brief heavy rain, lightning, and thunder, after which myriad birds tuned up their morning songs and the peepers in the cattail pond resumed their seasonal cacophony. Aurelia kept telling the rain to stop, but really loved imitating the thunder. Not sure why she wanted the rain to stop since she loves puddle stomping in her muck boots so much... but she is clearly entering a stage where she likes to experiment with her ability to influence the world around her. With all the new words she pulls out every day, she is unquestionably gaining some influence over us.

I saw the first henbit flowers in the garden on the first day of Spring 10 days ago, and we're now racing to get all the garden beds freed of the precocious weed before it adds another year's seed load. Onions, peas, spinach and lettuce are all planted, rhubarb and garlic are erupting, and our tomato seedlings have been appearing one by one in the greenhouse to join all the lettuce and brassica seedlings. In Ironweed garden we've been plugging away at putting together slab wood edges around another set of our raised beds, so that the oldest parts of the garden are starting to look more refined& and easier to walk through. I keep walking past our mushroom logs to see if they're starting to fruit yet. We've finished all the pruning, and now fruit trees are breaking bud; now I'm starting to get a little nervous about an unseasonal cold snap like the one last year that killed all the flowers and extinguished our hopes for juicy summer fruit. Just think warm thoughts.

The changing of the seasons is also apparent in the level of outdoor activity in the village. Liat finished laying the floor in the bus, which she continues to transform even though it hasn't moved to its new home yet. Our 1950's-era tractor has been down since midway through last year, and although we're shopping for a new one, Liat wants to get her home moved soon, and so is starting to talk to folks locally to find a willing tractor to get the bus towed out of its ruts and down West Road to her newly-dug foundation. Early in the week Aurelia and I helped her dig up some cherry and peach rootstock and transplant it to her warren, so the pieces of her new home are starting to come together.

Brian has been selectively cutting some oak trees just north of Dead Car Draw and hauling them back to the village two by two with the aid of a few friends and the hard-working cart Thomas built a few years ago. Brian plans a reciprocal roof for the cob house he's starting on this year. Each of the poles will run under the pole on one side and over the next, creating a self-supporting rounded roof structure. He plans a living roof on top of that, and I'm starting to envision a hobbit house in the neighborhood. I can't wait to see it. Meanwhile the pile of bark shavings under his work area grows with each pass of the draw knife.

One large cottonwood came down last year to make room for the new swimming pond north of the village. It was towed up the hill a bit, and Thomas this week got excited to go to work on processing the massive trunk into some beams and other useful sections. I accompanied Thomas and Brian to document the use of a two-person crosscut saw, one of two antiques that live high on the tool coop wall in the machine shed, and which Thomas patiently sharpened last year. I'd never seen one in use before, and got to take my turn at it over the course of a few days. With the aid of a couple wedges pounded into the cut, we finally sawed through with a satisfying crack that rang through the whole tree. And while he focused on one fallen mature tree, Thomas also found time to transplant 70 or so beautifully sprouted chestnuts he'd put in his rooting box last fall. 'Tis the season of rebirth.

Another bit of exciting news was the arrival Tuesday morning of Cole Holler Mazzioti, born at home to our Red Earth Farms friends Alyson and Mark. Colie is absolutely adorable, and has already made several forays out to their homestead cradled in a sling by her proud papa between bouts of nursing, napping, and generally recovering with her mama and their cat Mataar. Congrats to the new family! That makes a cohort of five kids born in the past two years in the immediate vicinity. I can only imagine the pack of them roaming the village paths together in a few years, but look forward to it.

In comings and goings, Jennifer, Toren and Cynder spent part of the week in Chicago, visiting the aquarium among other spots. Jan left for a few weeks to her old Ann Arbor haunts and to see family. Nathan, Rowan and Matt spent much of the week at the Sanctuary, a new intentional community in La Plata, helping with all sorts of tasks around the farm. I have yet to visit, but continue to be really excited about the growing community ties in this part of the country. I also hosted a student group from Washington University in St. Louis that engages in various service projects with an environmental bent. They visited last year, and we were happy to see them return. With their help we got eight cherry and four plum rootstock transplanted from the garden out to their new homes in our orchard, which just about completes the orchard planting. Now to focus on a whole lot of grafting work to get good scion wood onto all of our waiting trees.

We rounded out our week with some evening entertainment in the form of a couple movies and a dance party in the common house spun by a professional DJ who was visiting our neighbors at Red Earth Farms. Despite some fatigue accompanying my growing workload, I found myself energized by the grooves, and shook the kinks out for a couple hours before retiring for the night. Thankfully I stayed late enough to see Angela and the other kids perform the dance routine from Thriller. You never can tell what form of unusual fun we'll witness next around here.

One last note: as we get our rainwater collection and irrigation systems up and running this year, there are several roof pitches that we'd love to be collecting rain from. Toward that end, if you have any plastic or metal tanks that might be suitable for rain catchment and that you might be willing to let go, please give us a call. Anything from a couple hundred to a couple thousand gallons would be fantastic and help add to our irrigation capacity. Thanks!

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